Chapter One Introduction引言
拒绝是一种常见的言语行为，在我们的日常生活中可以很容易地观察到。因为它是一个“内在的面子威胁行为”（Brown &莱文森，1987：62），英语论文网站，人们采用不同的拒绝策略来减轻威胁到听话人的面子。然而，英语论文题目，就像其他的言语行为，拒绝是上下文依赖和特定的文化。社会因素可能对人们的思想和行为的作用时，他们表演的拒绝言语行为。Refusal is a common speech act that can easily be observed in our daily lives. Since it isone of those “intrinsic face threatening acts” (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 62), people adoptvarious refusal strategies to mitigate threat to their hearer’s face. However, just like otherspeech acts, refusal is contextually depending and culturally specific. Social variables mayexert influence on people’s thoughts and behaviors when they are performing refusal speechact. In other words, under different circumstances, people from different cultures may employdiverse refusal strategies. This research makes a comparative study of refusal speech act froman intercultural communication perspective.
1.1 Purpose and Significance目的和意义
Ever since the Speech Act Theory was first proposed by J. Austin, speech act haslong become one of the core issues of pragmatics. A great number of linguists devotethemselves to the study of various speech acts, such as agreement, humor, compliment andrefusal, whose effort has contributed to the development of the research. The past two decades,this decade in particular, witness abundant studies on refusal speech act carried out by Chinesescholars in a comparative way, and many findings are thus achieved. However, the focuses ofthese studies vary from person to person: some are conducted from a pragmatic perspective,some are from a sociolinguistic angle, and still some employ second-language acquisitionapproach. Few of them, nevertheless, are conducted from an intercultural perspective. In aglobalized world nowadays, intercultural communication has become an increasinglyimportant discipline that has developed fast in the past five decades. This is mainly due to thefact that with more and more advanced technology in communication and transportation,people from different cultures have more communication with each other. Knowledge of thelanguage itself can no longer meet the needs; many misunderstandings inintercultural communication are caused by pragmatic errors. Focusing on the discrepancy inChinese and American refusal speech acts, this research adopts an intercultural perspective,probes into deep cultural and social factors that affect people’s refusal speech act, and thushelps Chinese English learners improve IC (intercultural communication) awareness as well aspragmatic competence. The following two main questions will be addressed in this study:(1) In these two different cultures, does relative power influence people’s decision-makingregarding refusal differently?(2) In these two different cultures, does relative power along with social distance havedifferent impact on people’s refusal speech act?
1.2 Organization结构
This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter serves as a lead-in of the researchtopic, introducing the purpose, significance as well as the organization of the thesis. Thesecond chapter is literature review, introducing the previous comparative studies onrefusal both at home and abroad. Chapter three focuses on theoretic framework. Since thisthesis builds up its analytical framework upon Brown & Levinson’s face theory, takingKim’s conversational constraints as a criterion, other theories, either on pragmatics |
